"A lot of students just have a fear of poetry," said Mackey, a National Book Award winner for his poetic expressions. "They don't give it a chance. They freeze up. You just try to get them to relax and experience it before trying to give it some meaning."

Mackey should know.

The multi-faceted writer has been teaching poetry to college students for 34 years. He demonstrates his poetry - which he relates to the rhythms, rhymes and beats of music - tonight as University of the Pacific's Black History Month program concludes at the Wendell Phillips Center.

He also spoke to an African-American music class at Pacific on Wednesday.

Mackey has parlayed the free-form creativity of writing, the precise calculations of mathematics and a deep appreciation for music into a hybrid as a respected chronicler of the African-American experience.

"Memorizing and reciting are actually good things," said Mackey, 65, during a telephone conversation from Durham, N.C., where he's an English professor at Duke University. "Poetry's something that's spoken and heard. That kind of minimizes the anxiety of 'What does it mean?' or 'How do you interpret it.' "

Mackey said the cultural absorption of slam poetry and rap/hip-hop lyrics has helped dissolve some barriers.

"They've got their ear buds going all the time," said Mackey, who taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, for 30 years. "They're starved for it. There's such a mystique about it (poetry) that it can be disassociated" from what young people are listening to every day.

"Slam and hip-hop tap back into the age-old story of poetry. It's meant to be heard. There's a definitive continuity. Not just my generation, but the slam generation. It goes back to the actual roots of poetry. The whole lineage of poetry. There's an ancient reason they call them 'lyrics.' It goes back to 'lyre' in Greek."

Poetry shouldn't be chiseled into some definitive interpretation.

"I guess I was born with a high tolerance for ambiguity," Mackey said of his creative equations. "I'm almost like a Mobius strip. What they've heard, having read my books, is stimulus-catalyst provocation."

In addition to his 2006 National Book Award - for "Splay Anthem," a poetry collection - Mackey was awarded a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. He's chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has been editor and publisher of Hambone, a literary magazine, since 1982.

He's published eight books of poetry and is working on the fifth volume of "From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate," which he began in 2008.

"I'm approaching the half-way mark," he said. "I'm not working on a strong plot, really. It continues in the vein of chronicling the thinkings, doings and playings of a musician. The epistolary 'N.'

"I'm not a novelist. It's a poet writing prose as kind of a side genre. When it came to me, I didn't know what it was. I never would have guessed I was a novelist. It's poetic prose that took off and got a life of its own."

Mackey's life began in Miami. His family moved to Rodeo in the early 1950s, and then Santa Ana.

His mother, Sadie, raised four children. His dad, Alexander Obadiah, worked as a longshoreman and butcher.

When he was a child, Mackey "fiddled around with little stories" that "excited" an older sister. "They were about dinosaurs, disasters, volcanoes, earthquakes," Mackey said. "I'd take a pencil and scribble some stuff and say it was writing."

Math, science, engineering and astronomy - "I made it as far a calculus in high school" -were his first interests. After graduating from Santa Ana Valley High School. Mackey found his poetic voice while studying at Princeton University.

He spent time in New York's Greenwich Village, absorbing the rhythms and ethos of Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Amiri Baraka.

Mackey earned a master's degree in English at Princeton and his doctorate at Stanford. He taught eighth-grade algebra for a year in Pasadena before joining the University of Wisconsin faculty and beginning his tenure at UC Santa Cruz.

To Mackey, being proficient in math and creative writing isn't counter-intuitive. William Carlos Williams' "Pictures From Breugel" is an example.

"The two are very closely related," Mackey said. The way Williams' poems are arranged "creates an almost hieroglyphical effect, not unlike a differential equation. It's a recondite realm. A disclosure of something you didn't yet know. It's very related to the creative, imaginative part."